‘Arrow’s Stephen Amell Says It Was Always Going to Be Oliver and Felicity

The relationship between Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak is one that can be divisive among fans of The CW‘s Arrow. While there are many who dislike the pairing, still others have been cheering for the couple since nearly the very beginning of the series and now, the show’s star says that Olicity was always going to happen.

During an appearance at Heroes & Villains Fan Fest in Portland, Oregon today, Amell told fans that there never was another plan for who Oliver would end up with romantically.

“In our show, it was Oliver and Felicity, and it was going to be them no matter what,” Amell said.

For fans of the couple, this may not seem like news considering how popular the pairing has been since they first became a couple at the start of Arrow‘s third season. The show spent the next two seasons bringing the characters together only to have them break up with a lot of unresolved feelings and tensions between them before finally settling the issue during the final moments of this season’s four-show crossover. During the last hour of “Crisis on Earth-X,” the pair decide to get married alongside The Flash‘s Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) and Iris West (Candice Patton) in an impromptu post-Nazi invasion ceremony — a move that some fans and even characters themselves weren’t happy about. In fact, Arrow fans were so upset with not just how the wedding was handled, but that it had taken place at all that the show’s Subreddit briefly turned its support to Marvel’s Netflix series The Punisher in protest.

While Amell’s comments are unlikely to settle the Olicity issue for fans of the show, the couple being married and definitively together is likely a positive thing for Arrow. With the characters irrevocably together and the relationship settled, the “will they or won’t they” drama that many feel cluttered the story in earlier seasons is gone giving the show’s writers and producers the opportunity to look for new sources of drama — including the fracturing of Team Arrow at the end of the midseason finale which couldn’t come at a worse time. This season’s big bad Cayden James (Michael Emerson) has teamed up with a number of villains to go after Green Arrow, a grouping that Emerson told ComicBook.com was like an “axis of evil.”

“It’s like an axis of evil on the show. It’s fun because all these characters are so different, one from another, that they live up to the breadth and specificity of good comic characters, but it’s fun and a little thrilling to see them embodied by real humans with different ways of talking, dialects, or physical carriage, different styles,” Emerson told ComicBook.com. “It’s good that way, and I have especially enjoyed these last couple of episodes I’ve found where we are all together a lot, because it is such a swell bunch of smart, funny actors. We have so much to gab about between scenes. In a way, that axis of evil is my Arrow family in a way. We’re all on the same boat, too. Kind of in the hierarchy of a TV cast, we are the spicy guest players.”

Arrow returns Thursday, January 18 at 9/8c on The CW.